Dell brings up the 80-core chip
A Dell slide shown Tuesday was a reminder that a future 80-core processor is still in sight.
Flash back two years to the Intel Developer Forum when CEO Paul Otellini pledged to deliver an 80-core processor in five years.
Otellini said at the time that the chips will be capable of exchanging data at a terabyte a second and that the company hopes to have these chips ready for commercial production within a five-year window.
Michael Dell referred to a slide showing an 80-core chip Tuesday at SC08, a conference in Austin, Texas, focused on high-performance computing.
The trend of packing more compute power into small supercomputing enclosures "is really driven by what's going on in microprocessors. The x86 revolution continues. You see more and more cores. Increased performance. But also without more power required," he said, speaking during the keynote.
Dell slide shown Tuesday at SC08
(Credit: Dell Computer)In various venues, Intel has spelled out its intention to bring out many-core processors including its upcoming Larrabee graphics chip and future server processors that may reach 32 cores. Currently, Intel's Dunnington processor gets the prize (at Intel) for the most cores: six. Sun Microsystem's "Rock" processor will have 16 cores.
Brooke Crothers has served as an editor at large at CNET News, an editor at Dow Jones' Asian Wall Street Journal Weekly, and a senior editor at InfoWorld. His CNET blog covers chip technology and computer systems, and how they define the computing experience. He also contributes to The New York Times' Bits and Technology sections. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. Follow Brooke on Twitter @mbrookec. 
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/us/datacenter-high-end.aspx
And you can bet they are already working to support 96 and 128 systems as soon as they can due to customer demand (since 96-core hardware is available today).
Linux license may let you run any number of cores you want but in reality due to scheduler and application limitations you're better off buying multiple machines with less cores each rather than one giant box. Unless you're running a data warehouse type application that needs one huge instance (which you're not going to do on linux if you are), it's much more economical to buy a bunch of smaller boxes.
a fellow Tech
1. Have you used Linux lately? As in, this year?
2. It's highly likely that the people who'd have an expensive 80-core processor are both tech-savvy AND Linux users.
Windows is for gaming
Not to mention that Apple isn't likely to make a machine with more than 12 or 16-cores next year, and you're stuck with proprietary Apple hardware.
Windows users however can actually buy and use 64-core hardware *today*. Many Windows customers do just that for their data warehouse / business intelligence applications.
However, is it really that big of deal? If you can actually find me a CPU with 257 or more cores on it then yeah sure I'll run OS X orLinux on it. However, that's probably not going to happen. The 256 limit on 7 will probably be plenty enough until a new version of Windows launches and if not they can update with a service pack. It's really a non-issue.
There's a reason why on OS X today Apple only supports two processors and 8-cores. For general operating systems, it's very hard to scale to 32-cores. It's very very hard to scale to 64 cores. And it's incredibly super-hard to scale to 256 cores.
It's not just the number of cores but corresponding memory subsystem, applications, etc., to take advantage of the parallelism. It's very expensive to re-architect an OS (and applications) to be able to run highly parallel hardware.
A nicely-loaded 64-core machine today runs around USD $100,000... so considering that price-point not every OS will support even an 80-core system any time soon. The economic benefit is just not there for the consumer market.
Supporting large number of processors really is a "big a deal" and definitely not something a "service pack" can deliver.
As for the service pack. Yes you can support whatever new hardware comes out with just a service pack if you have to because there is no definition for what a service pack is. It can be big or it can be small. It can be a whole new kernel plus some stuff. It may be a very big service pack. You may have to boot off a DVD and install it just like a new OS, but if MS decides to call it a service pack then it's a service pack because they're the ones that say what a service pack is. Yes, originally service packs are mainly just updates but MS has used service packs for more than updates a few times. So, this argument is subjective and pointless and actually has no meaning.
As for things being too hard? Well, I'm very concerned about your attitude here. You must not even get out of bed in the morning as worried as you are about things being hard. Anyway, just to let you know since you stay in bed all day. Other people, when they get out of bed, they try stuff. They change things. They tinker. They invent new things. They try to make things more efficient. They go to the moon and stuff. It's called work.
If everything was easy what would be the point? We wouldn't have computers at all if everyone had that attitude. After all wasn't designing the very dual and quad core CPUs and modern day operating systems we have now also a very difficult task? Somehow they pulled it off. If someone invents an 80 core chip then trust me, Microsoft will find a way to bring it to its knees. They've never had a problem using up all the CPU power of any other machine before.
- by dreamer77dd November 20, 2008 5:42 PM PST
- well I believe developers should get the hint that multi-cores are here to stay alot longer then MMX memory did. or something like that. what programes can even take up 8 cores? what can take 80 core? unless software is not writen for these chips they will seam slow. hmmm
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